Watching horror movies, going to haunted houses, and finding the perfect costume definitely help put you in the Halloween spirit. However, nothing screams Halloween more than being surrounded by spooky stuff. So, if you’re looking to bring some fear into your everyday life, here are some eco-friendly decorations for your dorm to have a green Halloween.
- Yarn Spider Webs
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Instead of going to Spirit Halloween or Party City to get stretchable spider webs that will be thrown out immediately after Halloween, buy some yarn and make a craft out of decorating! Everybody loves decorating. It’s the perfect way to truly get into the spirit of holidays, and making your decorations will only add to this experience. Get creative and grab whatever color yarn you like and tie it into a spider web. You can hang this on your door outside to spook everyone walking by or on the wall inside your room. Once you want to take down your decorations, you can untie the yarn and use it for other crafts or keep it for next year!
- Load up on Pumpkins!
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Whether they’re the tiny ones you find at grocery stores or giant ones you pick, pumpkins remain the number one decoration for fall and Halloween. Pumpkins alone can be the decoration, but you can take it one step further and paint or carve your pumpkin! Once again, something as simple as decorating turns into a fun activity that you can do with friends. Putting a tiny pumpkin on your desk or a giant one in your windowsill instantly brings up the fall vibes of your dorm.
- Homemade Tombstones
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Just got a package in the mail you don’t know what to do with? Or an empty cereal box lying around? Instead of mindlessly throwing out the cardboard, use it to transform your room into a spooky graveyard. Break out the paint and get scarily creative coming up with tombstones to paint onto your boxes. Cut the box in the shape you want, making it flat so that you can tape your eerie headstones on the outside of your door or line the walls of your room with it. Also, make sure you use non-toxic paint to be more eco-friendly!
- LED Lights
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If you want to replace your fairy lights with a spookier alternative, make sure you buy Halloween-themed LED lights! LED lights are much more energy efficient, have no toxic elements, and last longer than alternatives. This helps reduce the demand from power plants and decreases greenhouse gas emissions. If you buy these lights, you’ll be saving the environment AND saving yourself from having to buy another set of Halloween lights next year!
- Ghostly Horrors
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Everyone’s seen the classic bed sheet ghost costume before, so why not take it a step further and use a white bed sheet to hide a ghost in your room? Roll up old papers you have or the school newspaper you got, tie it with a hair elastic, and form a ghost-like figure to drape your bed sheet over. You can use the leftover yarn you bought for the spider webs to hang your personal Casper on the inside of your door, the door to your bathroom, or on your bedpost. With this decoration, you won’t need to go on a ghost tour to see paranormal activity. The ghosts will be living among you! So spooky.
- Paper Bats
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First, grab some old paper lying around or buy recycled construction paper. Next, paint the paper black with non-toxic paint if you didn’t buy black paper. Now comes the fun part: crafting the paper into bats! You can make your creepy critters two dimensional to put on your window or door to scare people passing by or you can make three dimensional bats that you can hang from your ceiling from the yarn you bought earlier. Either way, adding bats to your dorm instantly brings up the spookiness.
- Spider Silhouettes
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If there’s one thing in the world I always will be petrified of, it’s spiders. And I’m assuming a lot of you would agree with me on that. So, what better way to transform your dorm into a terrifying place than adding spiders? Now, I’m not saying go out, buy spiders, release them in your room, and have fun living on the edge for the next few weeks. Instead, use the leftover recycled black paper from the bat decoration to cut out GIANT spider shapes. Next, tape these to your windows and pull the blinds down to give the illusion that enormous spiders are lurking in your windowsill.
- Milk Jug-o-Lanterns
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Rather than throwing away empty milk jugs, keep them around and use them as if they were pumpkins! You can paint or draw directly on the milk jug to create a scary face or figure. So, if you don’t have time, money, or availability to go to a pumpkin patch, you can still have a type of jack-o-lantern in to haunt your dorm room. Also, put LED lights inside to make the milk jug glow like a real jack-o-lantern!
- Gravestone Forest
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If you already have plants or succulents in your dorm, this is the cutest way to add a subtle decoration that makes all of the difference. Draw tiny tombstones on scrap pieces of paper, and cut them out. Make sure you leave a little bit of extra paper at the bottom of the headstone so that you can insert it into the soil that your plant’s in. Sticking a few of these in a potted plant or succulent creates a spooktacular look.
- Fall Leaves
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Watching the leaves change colors and blow around in the wind is arguably the prettiest part about autumn. So, what better way to bring the fall spirit into your dorm than by using the red, orange, and yellow leaves as a decoration? Go adventure outside, grab the most aesthetically pleasing leaves you can find, and bring them back to your room. Now, you position the leaves inside a flower vase, jar, or clear bottle to add the perfect touch of autumn to your dorm.
While store-bought decorations can look more realistically frightening, they are often made from plastic and just add to the amount of waste you produce. So, if you’re a lover of the environment and the spooky season, then following these tips is the way to go about decorating for Halloween. You’ll end up with amazing decorations (that are also cheaper) and have a fun time making them!